The Stamp show
About the Show
It is the NESS Metro Boston Stamp Show and it is touted as one of the largest shows in New England. It was held in a function room of a Holiday Inn. So, it was a nice venue with plenty of parking and a nice environment. I didn't count but there seemed to be somewhere around 25- 30 sellers of stamps. And it was pretty nice. There was a nice variety of items for sale.
I am not an expert on stamp collecting so I stumbled around for the first half hour trying to get a sense for what was what and it started to come into sense.
At a stamp show like this you have a variety of options open to you. For example you can look through books filled with stamps and the books themselves are for sale. And they typically are broken down by country. So if you like a particular country you can buy a whole book filled with stamps from that country. These can range in price from a hundred to a thousand dollars. Then there are whole collections of single stamps laid out in books so you can look through those to find those stamps that you really want, individually. Those range widely in price depending on their value.
Another very popular thing at this stamp show is first day covers. There were literally tens of thousands of first day covers which is rather interesting. But not really my thing.
But for a beginner that isn't really into stamp collecting as an asset and investment there are lots of wonderful options.
There were plenty of places with treasure boxes of thousands of loose stamps that you could pick through and buy cheap by the stamp. I found one box that was 10 cents a stamp and spent an hour sorting through it. I found these wonderful castle stamps.
Imagine having that much fun for about two bucks? LOL!
And then there are the topicals!
Topicals is the name for stamps sorted by Topic and there are some popular topics like Birds, Dogs, WW2 etc.. But my topics tend to be a little less popular. But I found some. (If you are familiar with my website you know the peculiar topics I like. And I doubt there are any stamps devoted to catapults but you never know.)
But I did find topicals for Castles and for Space astronomy and I sorted through a lot of fun stuff to find some bargains.
These are better quality than the treasure box of course and each stamp is priced. Or each set of stamps is priced. The typical prices range from 25 cents to around two dollars depending on a lot of factors like condition, used, unused, denomination, popularity etc.
I bought a whole bunch of them, mostly castle stamps.
Here is one of my favorites.
And this one, for some reason is my favorite. It depicts the death of Henry VII in 1313.
Some Tips and more
Well, if you are thinking about going to a stamp show like this I have some tips for you. First off, bring money but keep a budget. I spent around twenty dollars and it was well spent. But it is easy to get carried away!
Secondly, bring a magnifying glass with you so you can get a good look at the stamps.
Third, it is totally optional but try to have an idea what you might want to buy. There are a lot of options and it can get confusing. And you can easily run out of time! Once you start getting engrossed in the enormous number of stamps time is going to fly by! But then again it will be quite ok to have no idea what you are looking for and you can just let serendipity take over!
About the People - I definitely felt good about the vendors and sellers at the show. They all seemed to be friendly and nice.
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